Netwik
A shared global note network inside Obsidian, used by thousands of vaults
An Obsidian plugin that adds a public, collaboratively edited layer to a private vault. Any note can be published to a shared network, linked by URL, found through in-editor autocomplete, and edited by anyone — with changes synchronised back to every participant's vault.
- Create note
- Publish a new note into the shared network.
- Update note
- Pull the latest cloud changes for the note you are in.
- Upload current note
- Move an existing local note into the shared layer.
- Sync base
- Reconcile the local mirror with the cloud.
- Copy obsidian url
- Produce an obsidian://netwik?id=… link anyone with the plugin can open.
- Delete remote note
- Remove the note network-wide, not just from this vault.
The plugin's real command set, as documented in its README.
The idea
Obsidian is built around a private vault: your files, your machine. Netwik added the missing half — a public layer anyone can read and write, sitting inside the same editor, using the same links, without giving up local ownership of the files.
Type a trigger character mid-sentence and you get autocomplete over the shared
network. Pick a result and an ordinary internal link is inserted and the note is
downloaded. Type a title that does not exist yet and Shift+Enter creates it. Send
someone an obsidian://netwik?id=… link and it opens in their vault, downloading
the note first if they have never seen it.
Design constraints
The vault must survive the plugin. Shared notes are written into a w/
folder as normal markdown. Delete the plugin and you keep readable files. Delete
a local file and nothing happens to the network — the local copy is a mirror for
navigation, not the source of truth.
Names are for humans, ids are for machines. Filenames carry the note id so links stay stable through renames, but preview mode renders only the title, so the vault does not read like a database dump.
Moving a file is a publish action. Drag any note into w/ and it is parsed
and uploaded, then renamed to the canonical form. The gesture people already use
to organise files became the gesture to share one.
Outcome
Netwik shipped into the official Obsidian community plugin directory as Union Vault and has 4,241 recorded installs. It is the piece of my work that has run in the most other people’s hands, and the lesson that stuck was about failure modes: a sync plugin is trusted only if every one of its failures leaves the user with plain files they can still open.
# a link to a note this vault has never seen$ open "obsidian://netwik?id=6f2c…"plugin intercepts the URL schemefetches the note from the shared storewrites it into w/ as ordinary markdownnote opens in the editor, fully linkableThe flow behind a single click on a Netwik link.